Passover 2026: Great films to watch dur­ing the hol­i­day

While there are obvi­ously plot turns that will frighten chil­dren, such as the killing of the first-born, the film was made with kids in mind, so it handles these themes in a taste­ful way that avoids gore.

What people tend to remem­ber best about this 1998 film are the songs, one of which, “When You Believe,” which was sung on one of sev­eral soundtrack records by Mariah Carey and Whit­ney Hou­s­ton, became a huge hit.

Ofra Haza, the late Israeli pop diva who voiced Yocheved in the film, also sang the songs, “Deliver Us” (with Eden Riegel) and “Good­bye Brother.”

These were the days when Hol­ly­wood took Bible stor­ies very ser­i­ously and, in addi­tion to Heston, it fea­tures an all-star that includes Yul Bryn­ner as a glower­ing, malevol­ent Ramses; Anne Bax­ter of All About Eve as Nefre­tiri; Edward G. Robin­son as a lech­er­ous Egyp­tian; and John Car­radine (the father of David and Keith) as Aaron.

The spe­cial effects were cut­ting edge at the time, but look silly now. You might want to watch this with your tweens and make wise­cracks about how dated and weird much of it is.

It runs three hours and 40 minutes and it drags in some stretches, par­tic­u­larly with the tech­nicolor Egyp­tian palace intrigues, but you won’t want to miss all the extras writh­ing and dan­cing around the golden calf, a sequence with all the showy excess that its dir­ector, Cecil B. DeMille, was fam­ous for.

Although it does go into his early life a little and fea­tures an inter­view with his brother, whom I’ve never seen in any pre­vi­ous doc­u­ment­ary, it focuses mostly on how McCart­ney formed his band, Wings, in the after­math of the Beatles’ acri­mo­ni­ous breakup. For Wings’ fans, this is a must-see.

But no mat­ter how much you like McCart­ney when you tune in, watch­ing it will prob­ably make you appre­ci­ate him more, as his self-deprec­at­ing sense of humor and his devo­tion to his music come through.

He’s also hon­est about the sense of dis­lo­ca­tion and depres­sion he felt after the Beatles broke up, when he was in his late 20s. The most enga­ging aspect of the movie is the wealth of home movies of Sir Paul and his fam­ily in their rural retreat, and his love for his late spouse, Linda, which shines through every frame of this foot­age.

THE MOST talked-about series in the United States now is Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Car­o­lyn Bessette, which is avail­able here on Dis­ney+. It has sparked an interest in 1990s fash­ions and its music, show­cased in the series.

Some of the songs in the series, includ­ing “Linger” by the Cran­ber­ries, Dido’s “Here with Me,” “No Ordin­ary Love” by Sade, and “It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over,” by Lenny Krav­itz, are climb­ing the stream­ing charts.

Op-ed pieces in vari­ous news­pa­pers have dis­cussed the series in detail, par­tic­u­larly the accur­acy of its depic­tion of Jac­queline Kennedy Onas­sis, and Ethel Kennedy, as well as Daryl Han­nah, who dated JFK Jr.

I enjoyed it from the begin­ning, but now that I’ve seen the whole series, I appre­ci­ate its styl­ish­ness even more.

The early epis­odes were a little bogged down by some Kennedy fam­ily rev­er­ence, and although Naomi Watts is not bad as Jackie, we don’t really need to see her dan­cing with a por­trait of JFK to the soundtrack of “Cam­elot.”

The lead per­form­ances by Paul Anthony Kelly and Sarah Pidgeon grew on me, and like so many suc­cess­ful series, it uses an extreme case – the court­ship and mar­riage of the world’s most eli­gible bach­elor, pres­sured by his fam­ily’s expect­a­tions, and a styl­ish and fiercely inde­pend­ent woman who is houn­ded by the press – to show­case the kind of rela­tion­ship woes most young couples exper­i­ence, at some ver­sion.

When you start to think the two of them are spoiled brats – and the series invites you to see them that way at times – your impa­tience is kept in check by the tragedy that you know awaits them.

Two mem­bers of the sup­port­ing cast, Grace Gum­mer (Meryl Streep’s daugh­ter, who was in Mr. Robot and The News­room) as Car­oline Kennedy and Con­stance Zim­mer (UnREAL and Entour­age) as Car­o­lyn’s mother, give per­form­ances that start out cred­ible and end up very mov­ing. Aless­andro Nivola is also very good as Calvin Klein.

What works with Klein and with most of the char­ac­ters is that the series does not san­it­ize them, and they are shown act­ing weak, vain, and self-centered at times, which makes the show more fun than adu­lat­ory biop­ics and gives it more of the fla­vor of The Crown.

If you want to eval­u­ate how closely it tells the real story, Dis­ney+ is fea­tur­ing a new doc­u­ment­ary on the couple, John & Car­o­lyn: Love, Beauty, and Loss.

No one will ever know for sure what their rela­tion­ship was really like, but this doc­u­ment­ary con­firms that the series does a fine job in present­ing their style and the atmo­sphere of New York in the 1990s.

When one of her pupils is found dead in a canal, she teams up with her former part­ner, played by Rafe Spall, to solve the case, which is also linked to the dis­ap­pear­ance of her niece, years earlier.

The Welsh small-town atmo­sphere is haunt­ing, and the series places the mys­tery against the back­drop of the pres­sure on the town’s res­id­ents from cli­mate change.